Maybe? But, like, what's the value added by a bunch of useless bullshit buttons that will never be used? Greebles to make the customers think they're buying something cool?
Just put a menu one in there for the 1% of the times when you actually have to use the functionality there and don't do the equivalent of putting 30 widgets in your weather homepage.
It's not like anyone is losing their life or finds TVs to be unusable due to the status quo, but it also feels like the equivalent of cutting off the ends of your roast when putting it on a pan because that's how your mom did it which she learnt from her mom, without either of you knowing that the real reason is that your grandmother just didn't have a big enough roasting pan and it's just habit.
Those buttons have functions. Many of them useful. Like with every other appliance or toy, people find the minimum amount of functionality they need/like, and rarely go beyond it. Fortunately, when an interface is static - like a physical remote, and unlike the modern best practice on computers - it's easy to just ignore things you don't care about. Human visual system is great at this, it literally costs ~0 cognitive burden to ignore the 90% you don't need on a static interface.
Related problem is that software business, and through it UI/UX, is obsessed about gaining new users, so everything is designed for ease of onboarding, at the expense of ergonomics and efficiency of continued use. It's backwards and dumb, and subscriptions should theoretically prevent this, but the truth is, software products are pretty much unique (there's rarely an actual competitor to switch to with the same set of features you need), and most products die or get killed before they move past the growth phase, so incentives align to catering for first-timers instead of already paying users.
And then UI/UX gets trotted as some industrial design wisdom, and this kind of backwards approach starts infecting design of physical products...
Maybe? But, like, what's the value added by a bunch of useless bullshit buttons that will never be used? Greebles to make the customers think they're buying something cool?
Just put a menu one in there for the 1% of the times when you actually have to use the functionality there and don't do the equivalent of putting 30 widgets in your weather homepage.
It's not like anyone is losing their life or finds TVs to be unusable due to the status quo, but it also feels like the equivalent of cutting off the ends of your roast when putting it on a pan because that's how your mom did it which she learnt from her mom, without either of you knowing that the real reason is that your grandmother just didn't have a big enough roasting pan and it's just habit.